“If you want to blame it all on me and close the book, that will get the job done very quickly. But that does not go anywhere close to the cause of all this,” said Sir Fred Goodwin last week. Most of us do not have enough fingers to point at everyone responsible for this crisis, but – like it or not – we probably shouldn’t be pointing at him.

Sir Fred may not be a very popular dinner party guest right now, but blaming him for this crisis – or his counterparts at other banks – is as easy and as useful as blaming a small child for being naughty, or an alcoholic for enjoying a drink.

The case for the prosecution is well-rehearsed. Sir Fred was a megalomaniac, obsessed with growth and turning Royal Bank of Scotland into one of the biggest banks in the world. The route to that growth was a perpetual series of ever-bigger acquisitions which could be disguised as shareholder value. He substituted strategy for slogans like “make it happen” and surrounded himself with a Scottish mafia of yes men to parrot them. He treated shareholders and analysts like a bad smell, ignoring all the signs and advice against buying ABN Amro, and took RBS down in an inglorious fireball.

The case for the defence is more interesting. Sir Fred was a prodigiously talented banker who grew used to being told as much by those around him. By the age of 30 he was a partner at an accounting firm. By 40 he was chief executive of RBS. He rewrote the textbook on how to integrate a big acquisition with NatWest, and so enjoyed the taste of the deal that he pursued 25 more.

Analysts and investors applauded his cost-cutting genius, encouraging his crusade to catch up with HSBC. They liked the profits – in 2007, profits grew by 19% to a dizzying £7.7bn a year, and they liked where they came from, the huge but understated wholesale business. They didn’t ask too many questions and backed Sir Fred at every opportunity.

In May 2007, the last time shareholders had the opportunity to vote on him, they supported him with the same vigour as in a North Korean election, with just two thirds of one per cent voting against him. In August 2007, 95% of his shareholders supported the acquisition of ABN Amro, the deal which everyone now says was clearly a disaster waiting to happen.

In April last year, just to make their fury and indignation clear, 11% of shareholders abstained or voted against the remuneration packages at RBS, that everyone now says were so central to its demise. And one in 40 shares were voted against the non-executive directors including Sir Tom McKillop, the bank’s chairman.

On this line of argument, it seems that it was the shareholders, and not the management, who were asleep on the job. Recent research by Manifest, a proxy voting agency, confirms this suspicion: there is a perfect inverse correlation between growing profits and low levels of shareholders voting against the board, and the overall level of dissent by shareholders against banks is lower than in other sectors.

Of course, the voting records of shareholders are a poor guide to what they really thought, and voting against directors or their proposals is something of a blunt instrument. Many shareholders have outlined how they tried to engage RBS behind closed doors, but were ignored. They have explained how RBS exploited the fact that, with hundreds of shareholders, its ownership base was too diverse for any single owner or interest group to have much influence. This response prompted many shareholders to sell their holdings. But what those who stayed behind have not explained is why they failed to convert their discontent and threats into action.

This apparent failure is one of the most complex and important factors in this crisis. Banks and bankers did what they did because they could, because they were encouraged to do so for too long, and – even when a few people smelled something funny – because they were allowed to do so. A bit like small children and alcoholics.

Fixing this fundamental breakdown in governance will not require hundreds of billions of dollars, but it will be just as hard. First, governance must be redefined as an engaged and active approach to ownership that is applied as attentively in good times as in bad – if not more so – instead of as a mechanistic approach to a set of governance codes.

Second, it will require a collective admission by shareholders that they have not been as engaged as they should have been and have often been seduced by rising share prices and shapely profits. While they are right to highlight how difficult it is to make themselves heard, there has yet to be a clear mea culpa that they could have done better.

With that in mind, third, it will require the co-operation of markets and policymakers to identify and construct the appropriate mechanisms for communicating investor concerns that go beyond the binary – buying or selling a company’s shares – or the nuclear – voting against the company’s board.

In the UK, there are positive signs in this respect, with the Minister for the City, Lord Myners, already talking of the need to engage the ultimate owners – pension funds – instead of foisting the blame on those who act on their behalf.

Then – and only then – can we all agree to blame Sir Fred and his counterparts for steering us into this crisis.